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This thesis proposes the use of MSR (Mining Software Repositories) techniques to identify software developers with exclusive expertise about specific APIs and programming domains in software repositories. A pilot Tool for finding such
“Islands of Knowledge” in Node.js projects is presented and applied in a case study to the 180 most popular npm packages. It is found that on average each package has 2.3 Islands of Knowledge, which is possibly explained by the finding that npm packages tend to have only one main contributor. In a survey, the maintainers of 50 packages are contacted and asked for opinions on the results produced by the Tool. Together with their responses, this thesis reports on experiences made with the pilot Tool and how future iterations could produce even more accurate statements about programming expertise distribution in developer teams.

Using semantic data from general-purpose programming languages does not provide the unified experience one would want for such an application. Static error checking is lacking, especially with regards to static typing of the data. Based on the previous work of λ-DL, which integrates semantic queries and concepts as types into a typed λ-calculus, this work takes its ideas a step further to meld them into a real-world programming language. This thesis explores how λ-DL's features can be extended and integrated into an existing language, researches an appropriate extension mechanism and produces Semantics4J, a JastAdd-based Java language semantic data extension for type-safe OWL programming, together with examples of its usage.

The publication of open source software aims to support the reuse, the distribution and the general utilization of software. This can only be enabled by the correct usage of open source software licenses. Therefore associations provide a multitude of open source software licenses with different features, of which a developer can choose, to regulate the interaction with his software. Those licenses are the core theme of this thesis.
After an extensive literature research, two general research questions are elaborated in detail. First, a license usage analysis of licenses in the open source sector is applied, to identify current trends and statistics. This includes questions concerning the distribution of licenses, the consistency in their usage, their association over a period of time and their publication.
Afterwards the recommendation of licenses for specific projects is investigated. Therefore, a recommendation logic is presented, which includes several influences on a suitable license choice, to generate an at most applicable recommendation. Besides the exact features of a license of which a user can choose, different methods of ranking the recommendation results are proposed. This is based on the examination of the current situation of open source licensing and license suggestion. Finally, the logic is evaluated on the exemplary use-case of the 101companies project.

This thesis analyzes the online attention towards scientists and their research topics. The studies compare the attention dynamics towards the winners of important scientific prizes with scientists who did not receive a prize. Web signals such as Wikipedia page views, Wikipedia edits, and Google Trends were used as a proxy for online attention. One study focused on the time between the creation of the article about a scientist and their research topics. It was discovered that articles about research topics were created closer to the articles of prize winners than to scientists who did not receive a prize. One possible explanation could be that the research topics are more closely related to the scientist who got an award. This supports that scientists who received the prize introduced the topics to the public. Another study considered the public attention trends towards the related research topics before and after a page of a scientist was created. It was observed that after a page about a scientist was created, research topics of prize winners received more attention than the topics of scientists who did not receive a prize. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that Nobel Prize winners get a lower amount of attention before receiving the prize than the potential nominees from the list of Citation Laureates of Thompson Reuters. Also, their popularity is going down faster after receiving it. It was also shown that it is difficult to predict the prize winners based on the attention dynamics towards them.

Geographic cluster based routing in ad-hoc wireless sensor networks is a current field of research. Various algorithms to route in wireless ad-hoc networks based on position information already exist. Among them algorithms that use the traditional beaconing approach as well as algorithms that work beaconless (no information about the environment is required besides the own position and the destination). Geographic cluster based routing with guaranteed message delivery can be carried out on overlay graphs as well. Until now the required planar overlay graphs are not being constructed reactively.
This thesis proposes a reactive algorithm, the Beaconless Cluster Based Planarization (BCBP) algorithm, which constructs a planar overlay graph and noticeably reduces the number of messages required for that. Based on an algorithm for cluster based planarization it beaconlessly constructs a planar overlay graph in an unit disk graph (UDG). An UDG is a model for a wireless network in which every participant has the same sending radius. Evaluation of the algorithm shows it to be more efficient than the non beaconless variant. Another result of this thesis is the Beaconless LLRAP (BLLRAP) algorithm, for which planarity but not continued connectivity could be proven.

One task of executives and project managers in IT companies or departments is to hire suitable developers and to assign them to suitable problems. In this paper, we propose a new technique that directly leverages previous work experience of developers in a systematic manner. Existing evidence for developer expertise based on the version history of existing projects is analyzed. More specifically, we analyze the commits to a repository in terms of affected API usage. On these grounds, we associate APIs with developers and thus we assess API experience of developers. In transitive closure, we also assess programming domain experience.

Software systems are often developed as a set of variants to meet diverse requirements. Two common approaches to this are "clone-and-owning" and software product lines. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In previous work we and collaborators proposed an idea which combines both approaches to manage variants, similarities, and cloning by using a virtual platform and cloning-related operators.
In this thesis, we present an approach for aggregating essential metadata to enable a propagate operator, which implements a form of change propagation. For this we have developed a system to annotate code similarities which were extracted throughout the history of a software repository. The annotations express similarity maintenance tasks, which can then either be executed automatically by propagate or have to be performed manually by the user. In this work we outline the automated metadata extraction process and the system for annotating similarities; we explain how the implemented system can be integrated into the workflow of an existing version control system (Git); and, finally, we present a case study using the 101haskell corpus of variants.